Behavioral Expectations

How your emotions shape your behavior may depend in part on how you expect them to shape your behavior, finds a study in emotion. Researchers asked 182 participants to listen to either exciting or calm music. Then, they told some of the participants that the music would help their performance on a test of creativitiy (coming up with unusual uses for common objects), told another group that the music would hurt their creativity and told a control group that it would have no effect. Participants who listened to exciting music were significantly more creativity than calm participants when they expected excitement to be useful, while participants who listened to calm music were more creative when they expected calmness to be useful.